Well, that was harder than I thought it’d be

My face after finally figuring this shit out

I just switched (tentatively) to the Twenty Eleven theme for WordPress. I obviously don’t know anything about web design or CSS, but I found it annoying how narrow the content column is and thought, naïvely, that fixing it would be easy. I assumed I could just go ahead and change one or two lines in the style.css file and be done with it, so I looked at this bit:

#content {
margin: 0 34% 0 7.6%;
width: 58.4%;

and changed the 58.4% to something higher. I refreshed the page and it didn’t look any different so I also looked at this bit and reduced the width by the same number of percentage points that I increased the content width by:

#secondary {
float: right;
margin-right: 7.6%;
width: 18.8%;

That didn’t seem to do anything either. I then thought that maybe I had to create a “child theme” of the Twenty Eleven theme for things to work, so I restored the original style.css file for the Twenty Eleven theme and proceeded to create a child theme. The style.css file for the child theme was completely empty except for modified versions of the above two lines. It looked like this:

/*
Theme Name: Twenty eleven Child
Description: Twenty eleven child theme
Author: asdfgh
Template: twentyeleven
*/

@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");

#content {
margin: 0 26% 0 7.6%;
width: 66.4%;
}

#secondary {
float:right;
margin-right: 7.6%;
width: 10.8%;
}

This didn’t seem to work either. I gave up and decided that I should try to use the Twenty Ten theme and see if I could make it wider. I didn’t really care which theme I ended up using; I was just sick of the “Classic” theme that I’ve been using for a long time and wanted something different, so long as it wasn’t really, really narrow. So I went ahead and looked at the style.css for the Twenty Ten theme, trying to find the lines that I might need to change. I tried changing a few bits here and there that seemed, as far as I could tell, to be the lines that controlled the width of the page, content column and side bar area. Again, none of this seemed to work, regardless of whether I changed the values in the style.css for the Twenty Ten theme itself or if I made the changes via a child theme.

I then read a thread somewhere in which a user complained that he or she was trying to change something in a child theme but that no matter what he or she changed the blog looked the same. The person who responded to the post gave a very curt reply, saying, “clear your browser cache”. The OP responded to that message saying, of course, that all of his or her modifications were now showing up. Of course, after reading that I realised that this was my problem too. It really is as easy as just changing the percentages in the style.css file, but I ended up spending a few days wondering about this because I overlooked such a mundane factor as my browser cache. Dabbling in things you’ve got no knowledge or experience in sure is a good way to make yourself feel like an idiot!

Now this site looks decent without so much wasted white space when viewing it on my 1280×1024 monitor or my 1920×1080 monitor. I need to get a better header image though. This one doesn’t really fit.

Incidentally, I missed Mawaru Penguin Drum because I was so distracted by this. I ended up writing down the time incorrectly. Why the hell do Japanese TV stations have to list times in the early morning as though it’s part of the previous day? I was going to watch the show live streaming at 26:25 on July 07 (it’s weird saying that, since it’s still in the future in my time zone) but I missed it because I wasn’t paying particularly close attention and wrote down that it would be on at 26:55. I tuned in in time to see some commercials and then a rerun of Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko.

Summer 2011: Rou Kyuu Bu!

I’m sure glad this season is over. It was boring except for AnoHana. Rou Kyuu Bu is the first new show of the summer season. Of course, I didn’t expect I would follow it on a weekly basis, but since I have a week off from school and I need a break from watching nothing but sad shows like my current favourite, Oniisama e, I figured I should watch it. It’s a lot cuter than I expected which means I now know that I’ll at least watch the next episode when it comes out and I’ll decide then if I want to drop it or not. Here are the tropes I counted in merely the first episode:

Maid café

Bloomers

Unexpected tensai girl

Tall girl with a complex about her height

Shower oppai grope scene

Meganekko

Make no mistake; this is probably a terrible show. But the cuteness of it all is so overwhelming that it makes up for how agonizingly horrible the show really ought to be. My favourite character at the moment is Hinata, the little pink-haired one:

Cute bunny rabbits and cute lolis...

...a winning combination!

The protagonist of the show is your typical high school kid. He’s strongarmed into coaching the elementary school basketball club, which he agrees to do for three days only. Of course, he’s going to get attached to them and see things through to the end, I presume. I haven’t read the manga, of course, but it looks like a typical sports anime with the pleasant twist of featuring a team of adorable lolis. That’s the only redeeming quality of this show. Of course, you could argue that, if they’re cute enough, that’s all that’s needed to make an enjoyable show. I might agree with that argument. To be sure, I’ll have to watch more episodes for research purposes.

What’s obvious though is that the show would be unwatchable without the cuteness factor. Just look at the tough members of the boy’s basketball team who plant the seeds of conflict by threatening the protagonist, telling him to quit his coaching position:

If they were the team the protagonist was sent to coach we’d have no show. I suppose that’s not much of an observation though.

Of course, the show I’m most looking forward to of the next season is Mawaru Penguin Drum, which first airs on July 7th. Hopefully some good group decides to do English subtitles. Until then I don’t know what I’m gonna do. Catch up on Hanasaku Iroha I guess?